In the past we have seen arguments made against the Android platform, claiming that it was fragmented due to OEMs pushing out updates at irregular intervals. This combined with carriers requiring approval has caused some phones to remain on older builds of Android while the same model in another country could have been updated weeks ago. Things are slowly starting to change and fragmentation has become less of an issue these days.
Google has released its monthly report on active Android devices and their software version, and as you’d expect things are moving towards the latest releases. Android 2.2 is present on just 1.1 percent of devices accessing Google Play, down from 1.2 percent last month, while Honeycomb is still at its lonely 0.1 percent. Gingerbread is holding down a sizable 17.8 percent, but that’s down from 19 percent this time last month. Android 4.0, 4.1 and 4.3 all dropped slightly, but gains on Android 4.2 and 4.4 made modern versions (Ice Cream Sandwich and above) as a whole grow to over 80 percent for the first time. Android 4.2 gained one percentage point to 18.1 percent of active devices. KitKat makes the jump over the 5 percent (5.3 percent to be exact) mark for the first time, a dramatic jump to over double the 2.5 percent we saw a month earlier.
